moral indifference

Tales from a strange world

Published on 22/08/2010 in everything. 0 Comments

I want to tell you about a world that is very much like ours, except for one key difference: movies.

In this world, you can only buy movies in the movie shop. Most large cities have a movie shop, though smaller cities often don’t and towns are right out. Live in a village? It’s off to the big city to get your stories, kiddo.

And no, you can’t buy movies online either. OK, you can, but there’s only like three websites that sell them and they don’t carry a lot of stuff and they look really sketchy. You wouldn’t trust them with your credit card.

Anyway, back to the movie shop. In the movie shop there are all sorts of movie-related products for you to browse: toys and games, clothing, promotional posters and soundtracks… and even a few DVDs containing actual movies. These discs themselves occupy at most a third of such stores.

Also found in the movie shop are movie geeks. These social outcasts love nothing more than to talk about their favourite movies with each other, the weary employees, and if you’re particularly unlucky, other customers.

You see, gentle reader, on this world watching films is considered a terribly expensive and anti-social past-time. Most movie-watchers are actually embarrassed to talk about their hobby outside of the safety of their local shop or an internet community. Sometimes a radio drama or a play will be made based on a movie’s plot or characters (though not often both), and it might even do quite well, but mass cultural acceptance of the medium is forever fleeting.

Does this world seem strange to you? It doesn’t to me, nor will it to anyone else who reads comics. Yes, that’s the Shamylan-esque reveal that nobody saw coming – Bruce Willis I was in the present talking about comic books the whole time!

Comic books are, after all, just a story-telling medium like movies. They don’t just tell stories about people who wear capes and fight crime, just as not all movies are about spies who wear dinner suits, and not all books are detective stories wherein the butler did it. Very often these days the butler didn’t even do it!

Then again, the really good ones are about people who can fly, the rest is just pretentious nonsense about Nazi mice and whatnot. And the butler generally did it.

Comics: 1, Pirates: 0 (finally!)

Published on 23/06/2010 in everything. 0 Comments

It always surprised me that comics were so readily pirated. CDs are one thing, even DVDs: you put the disc in the drive, fire up your favourite application and most of them just handle it. It might take a couple of hours for a whole movie but that’s your computer’s time, you can go do something productive while your PC undermines copyright law and come back to a pristine digital file, bagged and tagged automatically with metadata and artwork.

The comic scanner, on the other hand, must first carefully remove the staples, then spread the pages on a flat-bed scanner. Then they fire up their favourite image editing program and, one by one, scan each page before slicing each image in half then tuning the colour balance so that each page looks right sat next to its opposite number scanned from a different sheet. Finally the images must be ordered and named before archiving them into a rar or zip file. It’s labour-intensive stuff, but these guys do it tirelessly, every Wednesday, slaving through the day and night so that a legion of people can get their comics fix.

Getting comics onto an iPad is no picnic either. The most reliable way is to make PDFs for Apple’s free iBooks app. Including the initial download it works out as a four-step process for getting your free comic fix.

Well today DC made their first same-day digital release through their brand-new iPad app: Issue #4 of Justice League: Generation Lost (which just happens to be fun comicking). At £1.79 it’s a modest saving of 41p versus a “real” store that’s likely due to an exchange rate wobble (the US price of $2.99 matches the comic’s American RRP), but the real drive here is the simplicity. I tap buy, confirm my iTunes password, and before my torrent client could have built up steam the issue is ready to read, right there in my hands. It’s the same process that Apple used to turn buying music and software into an effortless way to part customers from money.

It’s just one comic for now, with DC quiet about future plans, but it’s a good comic and it was stupidly easy to buy and enjoy. Hopefully the experiment works well and it’s not long before I can buy a new week’s Batman or Spider-man on my shiny Apple-toy. Until then, it’s an easy choice between driving half an hour to Nottingham or firing up Demonoid.